"A group contributor’s job is to help other people be more productive, and in doing that you sacrifice some of your own productivity. It’s a higher stress job and you get interrupted a lot more… [but] some of the highest compensated people at the company are relatively pure individual contributors."

The PC gaming pioneer also continued to state how an individual within the company won't be leading more than one consecutive project:

"When we started Valve, we thought about what the company needed to be good at. We realised that here, our job was to create things that hadn’t existed before. Managers are good at institutionalising procedures, but in our line of work that’s not always good. Sometimes the skills in one generation of product are irrelevant to the skills in another generation."

The strategy Newell has implemented in his company has clearly paid off (pun intended) - well, for him at least: he's worth an estimated $1 billion. Valve, meanwhile, is currently developing both Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2.